Comerica Park, Detroit (MLB #22 - The season unraveling)

 

 

Few seasons play out exactly as a team had hoped. After all, every team hopes to win the World Series, and only one out of the 30 will do so. Every season has ups and downs, but many times, a season will unravel, for reasons that might or might not have been foreseen. This evening, we watched two teams whose seasons may have both unraveled in the last 10 days.

Boston Red Sox – firing the manager

The Boston Red Sox made the playoffs last year. Over the winter, they lost one of their best hitters, Alex Bregman, to the Cubs via free agency, but they thought that they had improved their pitching and defense, so they thought they might be better this year than last. Instead, they started out by winning only 10 of their first 27 games, putting them in the American League East. So they fired not only manager Alex Cora, but also five of their coaches.

It was an ignominious end for Cora, whose tenure with the Red Sox started so well – in his first season, 2018, the Red Sox set a team record for wins in the regular season, and then won the World Series. That is likely to be what he will be remembered for in Boston, rather than the firing – with few exceptions, every manager ends his time with a team by getting fired.

Actually, firing Cora is a symptom of the season unraveling, not a cause. As someone who loves statistical analysis, I was fascinated by a recent analysis by Dan Szymborski of what happened for the rest of the season after a team fired its manager in midseason. The analysis went back to 2004, and included 40 firings. He came to two conclusions, neither of which surprised me.

First, in general, teams did better after the change than before. In 32 of the 40 individual cases, the team did better after the change than before, and the average winning percentage went from .414 (winning 41.4% of their games) to .467 (46.7%). Note, though, that those teams, on average, still lost more games than they won after the change.

Second, he used projections of how many games a team would be expected to win, based on the performances of the individuals, using the techniques of FanGraphs, a statistics-heavy website on which the article appeared. Over more than 3000 games managed by the mid-season replacements, their teams won almost exactly as many games as FanGraphs had projected at the time of the change. Actually, they won a total of 1.5 games fewer than projected.

What this means is that when teams fire their managers, they’ve been winning fewer games than you would have expected, and when they change managers, they come up to the level they had been playing at all along. It’s not good news for the Red Sox, since FanGraphs projects that they’ll finish the season winning slightly fewer games than they win. So far, they’ve won five out of nine since firing Cora.

Detroit Tigers – Losing the ace

Tarik Skubal has been the American League’s best pitcher for the last two years. He won the Cy Young Award as the league’s best pitcher unanimously in 2024, and the voting was nearly unanimous in 2025. Only Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates has been comparable in the National League. That’s one of the big reasons that the Tigers, who hadn’t made the playoffs since 2014, were playing October baseball each of the last two years. This year, with the addition of Kevin McConigle, who was just named Rookie of the Month for the league for April, and no major losses over the winter, the Tigers looked to be even better.

However, I’m sure the Tigers felt a sense of urgency. Skubal’s contract expires at the end of the year, and he is eligible for free agency. Up until a week ago, I would have predicted that he would be signing a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars total, over several years, probably with one of the teams like the Dodgers or Yankees who spend the most money on players, rather than stay with Detroit.

Skubal was scheduled to start against the Red Sox on Monday night. Instead, the Tigers announced that he will be having surgery for “loose bodies in his elbow,” and will miss at least two to three months.

That’s terrible news for the Tigers, who just lost their best player. The good news is that they play in a division, the American League Central, that does not have a strong team (now that the Tigers seem to be unraveling) this year, although no one seems to be terrible either, now that the White Sox have risen to mediocrity. At the moment, none of the five teams in the division has won more games than they have lost, but the worst record is 16 wins and 20 losses. If the Tigers can keep their heads close to the water (right now, it doesn’t seem like they even have to keep their heads above water), and if Skubal comes back in the two to three months predicted, and if he’s as effective as he had been, they could rally and make the playoffs, and if they’re lucky, they could make a deep run in the playoffs. That’s a lot of ifs, and if (and this is a more likely if) the Tigers don’t make the playoffs, this will be remembered as the year that unraveled this weekend.

It’s also terrible news for Skubal. The contract for a pitcher coming off arm surgery is likely to be a fraction of what the seemingly healthy Skubal would have gotten. So he may sign a one-year contract next year, in hopes of proving that the arm trouble isn’t permanent. I think that actually increases the chances that he’ll play for the Tigers next season, but will he be able to recapture the performance of the Tarik Skubal of 2024 and 2025? Only time will tell.

 

The game: Boston Red Sox 10, Detroit Tigers 3

For tonight, the Red Sox looked like a team that was revitalized by firing their manager, and the Tigers looked like a team that is reeling because their star is on the Injured List (even if he wouldn’t have been pitching tonight).

Over the winter, the Tigers signed Framber Valdez to a free agent contract. The details are complicated, but it’s been described as a three-year, $115M contract. Valdez is not as good as Skubal, but he is very, very good. In fact, one of the two or three most impressive games by a pitcher in our five-year quest was a game in which Valdez, then with the Astros, pitched eight innings against the Toronto Blue Jays without giving up a run. He’s basically been as good as advertised so far this year.

Until tonight.

In the first inning, the first two batters grounded out, the third singled, and the fourth hit a ground ball to Tigers’ third baseman Zach McKinstry, who bobbled the ball for an error. So now there were two runners on with two outs. The next Red Sox hitter, Cedanne Rafeala, hit a fly ball, on which the Tiger rightfielder, Wenceel Pérez, drifted back, looking like he was going to catch, and kept drifting back, and made a leap at the wall, and the ball went just over his glove (one of our guests tonight thought that he actually leapt in the wrong place by a couple of feet) for a home run. Now it’s 3-0 Boston, although I didn’t think Valdez was pitching badly.

The Tigers’ first hitter in the bottom of the first, Matt Vierling, hit a home run, and they scored another run, so it was 3-2 after one inning, shaping up to be a long evening, on an evening in which the predicted chances of rain were 70 or 80 percent each hour.

The second inning was uneventful, but the Red Sox got five straight hits in the third, scored five runs, and now it was 8-2 and starting to look ugly.

The first two hitters for the Red Sox in the fourth inning hit home runs, and now it was 10-2. On the first pitch to the next batter, Trevor Story, Valdez threw a pitch that Story couldn’t avoid and hit him in the middle of the back. More on that in a minute, but the result was that Valdez was ejected from the game. The Tigers scored the only run of the game from this point on, and the game, which had been going slowly, finished in a total time of 2 hours, 36 minutes. 

Incidentally, McKinstry, who made the critical error in the first inning, ended up making a couple of really nice plays. Did he have a good game? Given that the Tigers lost, I think the answer is no. 

The bench-clearing incident

Certain sports have certain traditions of brawling.

Bench-clearing incidents are rare in basketball and football. The latter might be surprising, given the violence of the game, but that’s the way it has evolved.  

In ice hockey, there is a tradition of having designated brawlers who will “drop their gloves” (take off their hockey gloves) and punch at each other. Sometimes, there will be two or three “fights” simultaneously. I’ve never been a fan of hockey fights (I go to the concession stand), although the Rodney Dangerfield line “I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out,” has even been used in marketing campaigns.

In baseball, there are bench-clearing incidents, but unlike hockey, punches are seldom thrown. Tonight was the first bench-clearing incident I can remember seeing in person in years, but here’s how it went.

Valdez hit Story with a pitch in the middle of the back, a pitch Story had no way to avoid.

Story took offense, and took a step toward Valdez. The umpire stopped Story, but

The Tiger bench poured out onto the field to support Valdez, while the Red Sox bench poured out onto the field to support Story.

The players in the Red Sox bullpen came trotting in from center field.

The players in the Tiger bullpen came trotting in from left field.

At this point, pretty much every player or coach in uniform is standing around home plate, yelling at each other, and at Valdez and Story, while the umpires try to prevent real violence from breaking out.

Meanwhile, Valdez, with his catcher and one or two other players, are standing at the pitcher’s mound, safely out of the way in case someone on the Red Sox decides to throw a punch. Remember, this is a $40M per year pitcher, so even if he’s having a bad day, you don’t want him to get hurt , and join Skubal on the injured list.

Eventually, the umpires settle everyone down, and eject Valdez. The Tiger manager argues briefly, but Valdez clearly didn’t have his stuff, so he needed to be replaced soon anyway. In one sense, the ejection did the Tigers a favor, because that meant that the relief pitcher got all the time he wanted to warm up, rather than being limited to the normal two minutes or so.

No punches were thrown. No one was hurt, except that Story will have a bruise somewhere on his back tomorrow, and Valdez’s ego must have been bruised. This was a typical bench-clearing incident for baseball. Like a soap opera, there’s a lot of drama, but not much action.

Comerica Park

I like Comerica Park. It’s a downtown park, with a great view of a nice urban skyline over the outfield fence. I also like the tigers atop the leftfield Jumbotron (one of them is visible in the picture at top). I’m less of a fan of the automobiles displayed in centerfield, but it is Detroit. 

I also like a stadium that promotes the sense of history of the game. Major League baseball is celebrating its 150^th anniversary this year, nearly 50 years more than any other sport, and the Tigers (and Red Sox) are among the teams that were in existence, in the same city, nearly 15 years before any of the other leagues existed. So celebrate it. 

 

 

Around the concourse, the Tigers have installations that describe the history of the team, decade by decade, with pictures, and a little text. The Tigers aren’t the most, or least, successful of those teams, but they’ve been a part of Detroit for a long time. I really like these.

When the Arizona Diamondbacks (the team for which I’ve been a season ticket holder for years) started, they promoted the history of the game. They had one small video board where they would run, depending on the day, a list of the MVPs by year, or a list of the World Series winners by year, or … you get the idea. During the 2001 World Series, the board ran the list of World Series winners every day. At the end of Game 7, the board went to “2001 – Arizona Diamondbacks.” I don’t know if anyone else even noticed, but to me, it signified that what I’d just seen was now a part of history.

I’m a fan of history, and I’m a fan of celebrating that history.

Comerica Park is high on my list of favorite parks.